Deeplinks Blog posts about Online Behavioral Tracking

Earlier today, Pinterest received national attention by announcing its new board suggestion program, which suggests Pinterest boards for users to follow based on websites they’ve visited outside of Pinterest. In rolling out this program, Pinterest took several important steps to respect the privacy of users:

Earlier, we posted about Twitter's new tailored advertising announcement. We applauded Twitter's commitment to privacy by allowing two opt-out mechanisms—both an internal setting and your browser's Do Not Track capability. To make things easier for you, here's a guide to opt out of Twitter's tailored advertisements and how best to protect yourself from online tracking.

Opting out of Twitter's tailored advertisements

Twitter has a simple, built-in setting for opting out of tailored advertisements. Opting out will not remove Twitter's ads altogether—which show up as Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts—but they will prevent Twitter from collecting external data to modify which ads you receive.

Twitter today announced a new way of targeting advertisements for its users, including a partnership with three online tracking firms: media6degrees (m6d), Chango, and Adara. This new system will display ads based on your behavior and reading habits, which show up as "Promoted Tweets" or "Promoted Accounts." This is typical of the direction that major online companies are moving. But Twitter has made some praiseworthy design decisions:

1. Twitter will honor your browser's Do Not Track setting by treating it as a "do not collect" signal. In other words, when Do Not Track is enabled, Twitter will not collect your browsing information in order to show targeted ads on Twitter.

This is part one of a two part series on current updates in Do Not Track. Part two will explore issues around default settings in more depth.

As summer wanes, EFF and other digital rights advocates are continuing to fight for Do Not Track, a one-click browser-based signal users can turn on to tell websites not to track their online browsing habits. In this article, we’ll be reviewing recent Congressional hearings about online tracking and discussing a Do Not Track proposal being promoted by EFF, Stanford, and Mozilla.